When comparing Textpad vs Yi, the Slant community recommends Textpad for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?”Textpad is ranked 29th while Yi is ranked 42nd. The most important reason people chose Textpad is:

Text Pad is fast and supports macros for easy handling of repetitive tasks

Pros

Pro

Fast and features macros

Text Pad is fast and supports macros for easy handling of repetitive tasks

Pro

Search and Replace

Excellent regex functions to manipulate data in large text based (csv,php,etc) files

Pro

Highly efficient

Textpad can handle large text files very quickly.

Pro

Easy to get started, especially for Java

When you require a minimal learning curve and a quick start to writing code, TextPad is one of the best choices. Especially for small Java projects, TextPad is the go-to editor for me.

Pro

Large number of syntax highlighting add-ons

It's easy to add a new syntax highlighted language to TextPad.

Pro

Combines and improves upon the best text-editing features from your favorite editors

Yi has default configurations for Vim, Emacs, as well as CUA. It also makes several improvements that includes Sublime-like (multiple) cursors.

Pro

More performant than Vim

Vim can be rather slow due the age of its code base. In particular, running large macros in Vim can be rather painful. Since Yi is being built from scratch it has been engineered for performance and with the benefit of hindsight.

Pro

Extensible and modular editing features

As far as extensibility goes, Yi easily outstrips any other open-source text editor. Motions can be built from parser combinators, making them simultaneously flexible and modular - an open source hacker's dream.

Pro

Plugins work together

Packages work together because they compile together.

Cons

Con

Disappointing keyboard shortcuts

The keyboard shortcuts in Textpad are a little dated.

Con

Very few plugins available

Even though Yi is a general purpose text editor similar to Vim and Emacs, almost all of the plugins that have been written for Yi so far focus on supporting Haskell as a programming environment.

Con

No way to reuse your existing customizations and keybindings

If you have spent years crafting your .vimrc or .emacs, there's no way to reuse it in Yi. You have to start from scratch.

Con

Requires Haskell to compile and configure

GHC + Haskell packages makes for a rather large installation, which is a big ask for a relatively obscure terminal editor.